The following description is provided to assist the understanding of the reader. None of the information provided or references cited is admitted to be prior art. Machine vision (or computer vision) refers to technology that allows a machine (e.g., a computer) to use visual information to, for example, extract information from an image, to solve some task, or to “understand” the scene in either a broad or limited sense. In general, machine vision is concerned with the extraction of information from image data. The image data can take many forms, such as single images, video sequences, views from multiple cameras, or higher dimensional data (e.g., three dimensional images from a medical scanner). Several approaches have been proposed for developing image data pre-processing schemes for machine vision based on abstract models of the operations of the visual system, but their effectiveness is limited. There remains much room for improving machine vision such that it can be more effective and practical.